Was dead against using AI for story outlines until I tried the "three character flaw" trick

I always thought AI prompts were cheating for writers, but my buddy dared me to feed it a premise where every character has a hidden vice and it spit out a plot twist I never would have thought of in 10 years. Has anyone else found a specific prompt hack that actually improved their rough drafts?

3 comments

3 Comments

kai_west1mo ago

Right there with you. I was super skeptical too, felt like cheating or whatever. But I threw my mess of a first chapter at it with "what if every character is hiding the same secret" and it built out a whole subplot about a lost email chain that tied everything together. My draft actually had direction after that instead of just meandering around. It's like having a buddy who's really good at asking the right questions, not someone writing the story for you.

jana_davis901mo ago

I mean, is it really that serious though? Like we're acting like using a prompt is some deep creative breakthrough. @kai_west I get what you're saying about it asking the right questions, but isn't that just a fancy way of saying you outsourced your plot problems to a machine? I've been writing for years without anything telling me what my characters should be hiding, and my drafts found direction eventually. It just took some staring at the wall and actually thinking, you know?

christopher3851mo ago

Wait, have you ever tried actually talking through a plot with someone who just asks the right follow-ups though? I was stuck on why my main character would even care about the mystery, and a buddy just kept asking "what's the worst thing that could happen if she doesn't figure it out" until I had a solid reason. That's more like what Kai is describing, not like handing the story over to a bot to write.